The NBA imposes a salary cap because the owners don't want to pay the market rate for their star players. It does not mean those stars aren't worth the higher salary in the money they generate for the team. It is an artificial limit that does not correspond to value.

That's not entirely true. The salary cap is because if teams paid the fair market value, the teams with a larger budget would be able to run away with it like the Yankees did in baseball (with over twice as many World Series titles as the next best). It keeps the league artificially competitive.

Keeping the business world artificially competitive is an interesting idea, and not as bad as I initially thought.

Technically, in baseball, the lower market teams get paid out of the luxury tax. Sometimes those payments exceed their team salary. The competitive argument sounds nice, but is more for the owners than competitiveness.

"Keeping the business world artificially competitive is an interesting idea, and not as bad as I initially thought."

I have no understanding of why it is a good idea or how, given CEO's and businesses are not teams competing for a trophy how it is even relatable.

They are teams competing for trophies, though; the trophy is your money/market share.

But beyond that, artificial competition could be a good thing. The large companies have a lot of advantages over the smaller companies, like economies of scale and name recognition, but they also have an incentive to stifle innovation (either directly or indirectly through the Innovator's Dilemma) and erect barriers to entry. Allowing smaller companies to "steal" CEOs helps offset some of those advantages. Even if they aren't well suited to that role, the name recognition alone can be an advantage (just look at SolarCity).

But I keep going back and forth on this. Set the salary cap too high, and the small companies can't steal the CEO away. Too low and it doesn't properly reward them for the difficulties of managing 200k+ person companies. A proper middle ground, if it exists, would be hard to find and need constant adjustments.

The only ones would could regulate CEO salaries in this manner is government and given the job they do with taxi cab medallions, I do not believe they are competent to do anything but screw it up.

Good competition in the marketplace tends to be good for consumers. It's an interesting notion worth a second thought.

Everything discussed about limiting CEO salaries is actually anti-competitive and will lead to control of everyone's salaries. That has never worked.

Salary is just one aspect of total compensation. The company might give the CEO a $1 salary plus big, non-salary cash or stock bonuses or options.

Ben & Jerry's used to have a CEO salary cap of 5:1 compared to entry-level workers, but the company later had to give in to recruit new CEO candidates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%26_Jerry%27s#Wages

But whereas the NBA can enforce a salary cap for its players, who would enforce the salary cap for CEOs?

Shareholders presumably, if they cared to.

US congre... Oh wait. There is no way something even way milder like making them pay taxes will fly.